Google Ads location targeting: “Presence or interest”, “Presence” and the mistake that pays for clicks from out of area

Of all the settings in a Google Ads campaign, location is the one everybody assumes they have understood. You type "Leeds", save, move on. A few weeks later, enquiries arrive from Glasgow for a service you only deliver in town, or clicks come in from Germany on a campaign meant for UK customers. It is not a Google bug: the default setting is doing exactly what it says — nobody read it.

"Presence or interest" and "Presence": what actually changes

Beneath your chosen locations, under the advanced options, Google Ads offers two ways of interpreting them:

• Presence or interest (the default, and Google’s recommendation): reaches people who are in, or regularly in, your chosen locations and people who have shown interest in those locations, wherever they are.
• Presence: reaches only people who are in, or regularly in, your chosen locations.

The key word is "interest". If a campaign targets Florence with the default option, someone in Munich searching for "farm stay near Florence" can see the ad, because they have expressed interest in Florence. For a farm stay, that is a gift. For a Florence plumber, the same logic brings clicks from people who live elsewhere and searched for something connected with the city — and those clicks will rarely turn into a job.

Note the word "regularly", too: with Presence, someone who works in the area but lives elsewhere still counts, and vice versa. For most local businesses that is desirable — the commuter looking for a dentist near the office is a real customer.

How Google works out where someone is

According to Google’s documentation, physical location is derived from several signals, where available:

• IP address, including that of a Wi-Fi network or a mobile carrier’s proxy;
• device location, depending on the user’s settings: GPS, Wi-Fi networks, Bluetooth, mobile cell towers;
• on the Display Network, also visit metadata such as browser time zone, domain, page language and content.

Interest, on the other hand, comes from what people do: the most obvious case is a search containing a place name ("seafood restaurant Brighton"), but Google speaks more broadly of geographic areas a user has shown interest in. None of these signals is perfect. VPNs, company networks that route traffic out through another city and mobile carrier IPs can all place someone in the wrong spot. That is why a trickle of "out of area" clicks exists even with Presence: if it stays marginal it is normal; if it grows, investigate.

Exclusions work on presence

In 2023 Google simplified the options: the setting that targeted search interest alone disappeared and, for exclusions, presence is effectively the only logic left. Excluding a location therefore means not showing ads to people who are there, not to people who mention it.

There are two practical consequences:

1. Exclusions are for carving out the area: target the county and exclude the town you do not cover, or target the whole country and exclude the areas you do not deliver to.
2. Blocking interest takes negative keywords. If you work in Bristol and do not want to appear for "plumber Bath", the lever is a negative on the city name, managed with the same discipline we describe in our negative keywords guide. Excluding Bath as a location does not do it, because someone in Bristol searching for "Bath" is not in Bath.

What has changed in recent years

• March–April 2023 Google removes the "Search interest" option and the presence-or-interest exclusion from the main campaign types; "Presence or interest" remains the default for targeting.
• May 2025 AI Max for Search campaigns brings locations of interest at ad group level.
• December 2025 Demand Gen campaigns also gain an explicit choice between "Presence" and "Presence or interest".

Performance Max has offered the same Presence versus Presence or interest choice in its location settings for some time. The general rule does not change: check the option on every campaign, because it is not inherited from the others.

AI Max and locations of interest in the ad group

In Search campaigns with AI Max you can set, for each ad group, the locations a user must have shown interest in. The campaign keeps its own geographic targeting; the ad group adds a second filter. If the search carries a geographic intent, that is what counts; if it does not, physical location counts. Both conditions, campaign and ad group, must be met for the ad to show.

The textbook case is travel: a campaign targeting Germany and Austria, with a "Lake Garda" ad group and a "Dolomites" ad group, each with its own location of interest. The filter applies to everything that can trigger the ad, including AI Max’s keywordless matches, so it is a control tool as much as an expansion one. It is positive-only: there is no need to add exclusions at ad group level. If you are weighing up AI Max, the full picture is in our AI Max guide.

Radius, location groups and postcodes

Beyond countries, regions, counties and towns, you can define the area in other ways:

• Radius around an address or a point, with a minimum of 1 km. Handy, but a circle ignores rivers, hills and ring roads: a list of towns often describes the real catchment better.
• Location groups: places of interest, your business locations linked through location assets and, in some countries, demographic tiers. For multi-site businesses it is the tidiest way to target the area around each branch, as we explain in our piece on local businesses and location assets.
• Postcodes: Google’s official table of location target types by country lists postal codes among the available target types for a number of countries, Italy included. Enter them in the full local format (for Italian CAPs, five digits with leading zeros: 00185, not 185) and check in the interface that every code is recognised.

Two caveats. First, Google applies minimum area and user thresholds for privacy reasons: very small targeting may be widened or produce hardly any impressions. Second, postcode areas vary hugely in size. A postcode makes sense when your catchment genuinely follows those boundaries — a delivery zone, for instance.

Bid adjustments or separate campaigns?

With Smart Bidding strategies — Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximise conversions or conversion value — location bid adjustments are not applied: location is already one of the signals the algorithm uses in every auction. Putting +20% on London, in practice, does nothing.

If an area deserves different treatment, the route is a separate campaign. That makes sense when:

• margins or delivery costs genuinely differ (and with them the CPA or ROAS target);
• a dedicated budget is needed, for example for a new branch that must not be starved by the established ones;
• language, ads or landing page change;
• and each campaign has enough conversions to learn.

Without that last condition, splitting does more harm than good: two campaigns that cannot learn underperform one that can. The reasoning is the same as in our account structure consolidation guide.

How to read the location reports

On the Locations page you will find two views:

• Targeted locations: performance broken down by the locations you set.
• Matched locations: performance broken down by the locations your ads were actually matched to, which may be the user’s physical location or a location of interest.

To separate one from the other you need Report Editor and the Location type dimension (physical location or area of interest). This is the check we recommend before touching the setting: if the share of spend coming from interest is high and converts poorly, switch to Presence; if it converts well — say, people in London booking a hotel in York — keep it.

Language targeting

Language is the other half of targeting, and it is often misunderstood. It translates nothing: it decides which users see your ads based on the language signals Google picks up, such as user settings and the language of their searches. You write the ads, in the right language. The way Google interprets these signals has evolved over time, so rather than memorising rules it pays to think in cases:

• Local services: the local language, plus others only if your ads and site actually serve those speakers. Opening up to every language achieves little if the ads and site are English-only.
• Inbound travel: one campaign or ad group per market, with ads and pages in that market’s language. An English ad shown to a German-speaking user is a wasted click or a lost impression.

Three practical cases

Local service (plumber, dentist, beauty salon)

Presence, with the area defined by towns or a radius around the real catchment, and negative keywords for the cities you do not cover. With several branches, location groups tied to location assets.

Travel and destinations

Here, interest is the heart of the business. Two approaches: target the destination with Presence or interest, or target the source markets with keywords that include the destination. With AI Max, the cleanest combination is the second, with locations of interest in the ad groups. Either way, align language with the market.

Nationwide ecommerce that does not ship everywhere

A furniture retailer that does not deliver to the Scottish islands, or charges more for Northern Ireland: Presence on the country, exclusion of areas not served, and consistency with the shipping settings in Merchant Center — otherwise the ad promises what checkout later refuses. If the costlier areas have different margins but enough volume, give them their own campaign with its own ROAS target.

The settings at a glance

If you want to know how much of your spend currently comes from people outside the area you serve, our free audit starts from your account’s location reports. You can see how we work in the process section, and which services cover local campaign management.